h, except
when merely that of pleasure, is of the old hostile character. In Iliad,
xi, 378, Paris, having hit Diomed, from behind a pillar with an arrow in
the foot, springs forth from his concealment and laughs at him, saying
he wished he had killed him. In Iliad, xxi, 407, where the gods descend
into the battle, Minerva laughs at Mars when she has struck him with a
huge stone so that he fell, his hair was draggled in the dust, and his
armour clanged around him. In the Odyssey, Ulysses speaks of his heart
laughing within him after he had put out Polyphemus' eye with a burning
stick without being discovered. And in Book xviii, Ulysses strikes Irus
under the ear and breaks his head, so that blood pours from his mouth,
and he falls gnashing and struggling on the ground, at which, we are
told, the suitors "die with laughter."

From this hostile phase the transition was easy to ridiculing personal
defects, and so Homer tells us that when the gods at their banquet saw
Vulcan, who was acting as butler, "stumping about on his lame leg," they
fell into "unextinguishable laughter."

Thersites is described as "squint-eyed, lame-legged, with bent shoulders
pinched over his chest, a pointed head, and very little hair on it."
Homer may merely have intended to represent the reviler of kings as
odious and despicable, but there seems to be some humour intended.
Ridicule of personal defects must always be of an inferior kind, being a
matter of sight, and of small complexity. As the first advance of the
ludicrous was from the hostile to the personal, so the beginning of
humour seems to have been the representation of personal defects.[7]

In accordance with this, we find that the only mention of laughter made
by Simonides of Amorgos is where he says that some women may be compared
to apes, and then gives a very rude description of their persons. This
subservience to the eye can also be observed in the appreciation of
monkeys and dancing horses, already mentioned, the latter forming a
humorous exhibition, as the animals were trained with a view to amuse.
We have marks of the same optical tendencies in the appreciation of
antics and contortions of the body, either as representing personal
deformity, or as a kind of puzzling and disorderly action. A little
contemporary story related by Herodotus shows that these pantomimic
performances were now becoming fashionable in Athens. Cleisthenes,
tyrant of Sicyon, was even at this date so much in